Russia’s Resentment of the West Began with a Broken Promise

[marmar]

from Truthdig:



Russia’s Resentment of the West Began with a Broken Promise

Posted on Oct 21, 2008
By William Pfaff


It did not take the clash between Russia and Georgia to reveal that relations between Russia and the West have taken a bad turn. They have been deteriorating since the mid-1990s, when the decision was taken to expand NATO to include the former Warsaw Pact states. At the time of that decision, George F. Kennan, the most eminent American diplomat of his time, said this could be the most disastrous mistake made in American foreign policy in decades. He erred only in underestimating the comparative scale of the blunders that would follow, in the George W. Bush administration.

In a recent column I quoted the final U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, on the promise made personally by President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev, that if East Germany was allowed to unite with West Germany, and the USSR placed no obstacle to a unified Germany’s continuing as a NATO member, the Western alliance would not attempt to expand any further into what had been Warsaw Pact Europe. The president and the secretary of state agreed, with Baker saying, according to Matlock, “not one inch.” In September 1990, German unification took place.

Unfortunately, the agreement seems never to have been written down. Chairman Gorbachev undoubtedly looked deeply into Bush’s and Baker’s eyes, as Bush Jr., 11 years later, was to look deeply into the eyes of Vladimir Putin. Gorbachev saw the souls of American gentlemen. The young Bush saw in Putin the soul of a democrat. There were mistakes made all around.

Bill Clinton arrived in the White House and electoral advantage called. The U.S. lobbies of the East European countries demanded that they be included in NATO. The most influential was the Polish lobby in Chicago, which could swing the city and perhaps the state. In 1994, the so-called Partnership for Peace was created, a kind of cadet-membership in NATO. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined, and in 1999 became full members of NATO. By this time, Republicans and Democrats were bidding for the election votes of American supporters of the rest of the ex-Warsaw Pact states, and those of the Baltic nations as well, which during the Second World War had been incorporated into the Soviet Union. They all joined NATO in 2004. Next came the candidacies of Ukraine and Georgia, both of which had been integral parts of the czarist Russian empire from the 19th century onward. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081021_russias_resentment_of_the_west_began_with_a_broken_promise/?ln

[Igel]

1. Pfaff sees what interests Pfaff, first and foremost.

First, there are no Poles and Czechs. They have no volition, they do not matter--unless they're in the US. Otherwise, they are merely pawns, objects, to be moved and treated by American political actors. They are of no greater worth than small landowners when a city council, flush with developers' lobbyists' gifts and money, is debating rezoning an area and re-election is 3 years away.

Moreover, he also believes that he is in charge of the stopwatch and gets to say when events and attitudes started to matter. There are many people like that. If something happens on March 1 that triggered an event on March 2, *and* the event on March 1 doesn't fit the narrative, then everything that matters, everything that needs to be considered, could only have started on March 2. To refer to anything pre-March 2 is like referring to the pre-Cambrian era in a discussion of Cold War policies--a distraction, an irrelevancy, an absurdity. He determines which facts are admissible, and which may matter.

In other words, nothing prior to 1990 happened. Nothing that happened after 1990, unless it involved the US and Russia, matters.

Eh. Imminently forgettable drivel.